The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani and friends.

MEMRI vs. Cole

Juan Cole, of the foremost Middle East blog juancole.com has been threatened with a lawsuit by MEMRI, the infamous "media research" think tank that seems to find most of its time misrepresenting the Arabic press by picking out the worst articles and calling them representative. Read the original post and Cole's follow up -- they reveal more about what kind of organization MEMRI is than anything he's written in the past. This whole incident is going to backfire on MEMRI and help expose it as the fraud that it is, especially as other major blogs are likely to be on his side. (And yes, you can sue me too, MEMRI, if you care to.)

Update: As I thought, this is backfiring on MEMRI: look at all the attention that it's getting, as well as the calls for investigations into exactly how MEMRI operates in these posts [1, 2] on juancole.com. Of particular interest would be investigating MEMRI's Jerusalem offices, for which Cole prints the address. Jerusalamite bloggers might want to look into it.